A poor report from the International Olympic Committee's evaluation team can probably cost your city the chance to host the Games.

But can an outstanding write-up really win it for you?

The inspectors have completed their tour of the five bidding cities and in June, they will submit their conclusions to the IOC.

When that report is published and a ranking of sorts becomes clear, there will be those who assume that the voting will be a mere formality.

But they would be wrong. History tells us the favourites rarely win.

Athens looked certain to host the Centenary Games in 1996, but lost out to unfancied Atlanta.

The Greek capital of course came good for 2004, when the smart money was on Rome, and everyone thought they would be walking on the Chinese wall in 2000, but of course we all went to Sydney and not Beijing.

A bid is won and lost not exclusively in the written word, but also in the creation of a positive perception, a sense of natural justice and whose turn it is.

In the past, careful lobbying mingled with the odd bit of "incentivisation".

I say in the past because after the lobbying and incentivising got out of hand during the battle for the 2002 Winter Games, infamously won by Salt Lake City, the rules changed radically.

Contact between representatives of the bidding cities and IOC members is now strictly controlled - almost to the point of making it impossible for the competing cities to well, frankly, compete.

In the past, bids regularly used 'consultants' to draw up detailed dossiers on each of the 120 or so individual voting members, including a comprehensive list of their preferences, from sexual to whether they took sugar in their coffee.

Bids wanted to know exactly which buttons to press in the lobbying process. If a member liked football, you took them to a game.

If they admired a certain breed of dog, you sent them one (see Salt Lake City).

There's a story that does the rounds from the time of the decision for the 1992 Games, where a guest in the same hotel as the IOC members complained to reception he could not get to his bed.

His room had been filled with gifts from the rival bidders by mistake.

These excesses were halted after Salt Lake, and so now in theory the playing field has been levelled.